


a wolf, a queen

by viviandarkbloom



Category: Last Tango In Halifax
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, all aboard the ss snotty bitch, alternate universe - it's not too cracktastic this time, middle-aged women behaving badly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-13
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-06-27 00:06:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 13,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15674001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viviandarkbloom/pseuds/viviandarkbloom
Summary: A more straightforward, modern AU for your delectation. While it is the usual verbal wankfest, it's not super long, so at the end of the day you won't have to sing it a power ballad or put a ring on it. It's cool, Vincent.





	1. Ulysses on the balustrade

_Animals who ride on top of one another become entangled in ways they do not expect. From behind its back you may see a wolf as a queen, or a hill as a holy body or action as a fact. But facts form themselves this way and that, when we look for them in photographs or historical accounts._

\- Anne Carson, from _Plainwater_

_The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular one and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries._

\- Iris Murdoch, from _The Black Prince_

The house is sold, the marriage over, the lover gone. She starts smoking again.

Caroline exhales another cloud of cigarette smoke, watches the change of color as it wafts through the air: white, blue-gray, gray-gray, gone, disappearance a shade all its own. The sun tucks into the horizon and the cloying chill of late summer evening lays thick on her skin. She’s in a garden outside a country house aged with spiky vines. From her position on the terrace, leaning against the stone balustrade, she squints and teases out a multitude of pathways leading to an herb garden, a fountain, even a fucking rotunda transported from immaculately landscaped and probably more famous grounds than these. At this distance and angle a statue of a retriever along a pathway looks like a headless woman, the Nike of Samothrace unearthed from cyan dusk; in the archaeology of dreams it is an encouraging find, a hopeful talisman for those who peer hopelessly into a void or a horizon, looking for a sign of land, for a home.

She could leave and drive back home, but home was not home, just a flat on the edge of Hebden Bridge, and this was not a party but a summons, this was not desire but compulsion—and these statements she recites to herself are not immutable truths but facts easily contorted this way or that, leading to a wealth of outcomes, some of them satisfactory.

There is nothing to do but wait for a woman. Not a woman she’d ever thought she’d wait for or even want, but over these weeks and months the story has changed several times, endless reels of pursuits and retreats leading to another story. In one story she’s free and in love. In another, scrambling for a toehold on everything. In this story, she’s sold herself. She’s waiting for a queen—or perhaps an animal, a wolf. Already she’s lost track of the winding path and sinuous identity of the seducer, already the story shifts with supple speed. She exhales. A cloud of cigarette smoke haunts the garden, dissipating along a hedge-lined pathway. Turn a corner and you’re somewhere else, turn a corner and you’re someone else.

 


	2. comedown machine

The new head of Kate’s school, Sulgrave Heath, is not what Caroline expects. Kate had described the woman as “a rock star of sorts”—a much-vaunted prize acquisition by the school’s board, gleefully pilfered from another institution. The woman standing before her gives no such impression: just another short, plain-looking middle-aged teacher, nothing special.

Then a handshake—cool, strong, authoritative—a head tilt, a wry smile. The woman is self-aware enough to know she does not impress at first glance. At this fresh angle, an unexpected reveal: a handsome face, an arresting gaze. Caroline looks at their interlocked hands, in particular the woman’s wrist, sinew and bone twining together in a perfect balance of sturdiness and intricacy and poking out of the elegant, well-tailored cuff of a dark, subtly pinstriped suit.

“Gillian Greenwood.”

Caroline smiles back. “How do you do?”

“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Eliot.”

“It’s Ms. Dawson now.”

“Of course. My apologies. I hear your youngest might be joining us in the fall?” The Northern accent is faint but present. No posh education here. Probably went to Leeds. Caroline reminds herself to keep the attitude in check; after all, Kate only went to Durham, and it’s not as if her own degree from Oxford has carried her very far from home, or anywhere at all. No great, exultant heights scaled here. Ever since gifted with that diploma, life has revealed itself as one massive comedown machine.

Despite all that she still believes in the value of education, and Christ knows Lawrence is going to need all the help he can get before he’s dropped into the maw of adulthood. “If all goes according to plan, yes,” Caroline replies.

“I look forward to it.” Gillian smiles again. From across the room someone waves at her frantically. “If you’ll excuse me—it was lovely meeting you, and I hope we have the opportunity to meet with Lawrence as well. Best wishes for the holidays.”

Caroline watches her stalk away—short, purposeful strides of dogged determination: _I will be charming and lovely and make sure everyone has a great time._ She is impressed the woman remembers Lawrence’s name; obviously, she does her homework.

Minutes later, Kate’s warm touch is on her arm. “So you met her.”

“Yeah.” For a moment they watch Gillian chatting with a small group—perhaps prospective parents, perhaps teachers. She’s animated, telling a story, gesturing, punctuating the vignette with open-armed gesture of surrender. The group laughs loudly and Caroline experiences an odd disappointment that she did not provide a suitable audience for the head’s obvious storytelling skills. “You really like her?”

Kate hums, nods enthusiastically. “So far, so good. She’s very straightforward at times—but that’s good, you know? No second-guessing what she wants or expects. And the students adore her.” Kate sips a glass of rose, an easily forgivable sin, a minor seasonal transgression, particularly when the pink tip of her tongue swipes at her lower lip with slow, absentminded delight.

Caroline remains dubious. “But—a ‘rock star’?”

“See, she’s a success story—a rare success story, I think, but she’s touted as a triumph of the continuing education system.” Kate nods in Gillian’s general direction, as the latter continues working the room. “Think about it: a widowed farmer decides to go to university, works her way through while raising a young child, gets her degree, gets certified to teach, and moves steadily up the ranks until she’s a head. All this accomplished in less than a decade. It’s amazing.”

Caroline stifles commentary. She thinks teaching or getting a teaching degree can’t really be that hard; nothing, she thinks, compared to research science. But she’s had this argument with Kate before, an argument she didn’t think she was losing until it killed a promising bit of foreplay and required a fair amount of groveling on her part afterwards. Not that she minded the kind of groveling that resulted in having her name moaned repeatedly.

“On the other hand,” Kate continues, “she doesn’t come without risk or controversy.”

“What?”

“Well—” She shakes her head vigorously. “I shouldn’t. They’re just rumors.”

“Oh come on,” Caroline goads gently. “Who am I going to tell?”

“Well.” Kate pauses for effect and, despite the white noise all around them, lowers her voice. “Her husband died in an accident on their farm. There’s this gruesome rumor, pops up from time to time, that she actually killed him. Apparently he was a real shit—abusive, alcoholic.”

“He deserved it, sounds like.”

“You’re terrible.” Kate’s bubbling laugh undermines the judgment. “But there are some not-so-gruesome rumors as well.”

“Such as?”

“That she’ll shag anyone with a pulse.”

“Anyone?” Caroline drawls, while Kate continues to giggle. “Does she know about you? About us?”

“Of course, you numpty. Chatting the other day in the hall, she told me to bring a plus-one to the Christmas party. I said, ‘all right, I’ll bring my girlfriend.’ Didn’t bat an eye.”

“Well, then.” Across the room, Gillian Greenwood finally stands alone, drinking. “She won’t mind if I kiss you, will she?”

“You are being uncharacteristically bold.”

“I’m in a good mood. And you are characteristically beautiful.”

“Think that’s the wine talking.” Kate nods at the moat of red in Caroline’s glass. She grins. “Does it turn you on, having a crowd, including my new boss, watch us kiss?”

“It turns me on to kiss you. And yes, I like showing off that I’m with the most beautiful woman here.”

“Is Gillian runner-up in your beauty contest here?” Kate asks with blunt mischief. “Watching you two—thought I detected a bit of a spark there.”

Caroline forces a smile. Kate is no fool; rather, she’s irritatingly observant. After years of marriage to John, it’s a welcome change of pace. Except when she notices things Caroline would rather keep under the bonnet. “Kiss me,” she says.

Despite the fraudulent, long-suffering sigh, Kate is also easily swayed by sensual command. “You always get your way.” She finishes off the glass of rose. Caroline leans in and captures her mouth, the sweet taste floods her senses and, as her tongue teases a serpentine trail along Kate’s lips, she spots out of the corner her eye Gillian Greenwood, watching them intently.


	3. another resounding failure of the British education system

“Sure you don’t want a drink, Ms. Dawson?” From a drawer, Gillian pulls out a large silver flask and nods at two granny-esque teacups on the desk blotter.

“No thanks,” Caroline replies. “And I thought we had settled on first names.”

After hours and drained of students, Sulgrave Heath is a suitably spooky echo chamber for Caroline’s past, not to mention a good locale for the BBC’s next tasteful and incoherent supernatural horror series. In the hallway her heels had clicked ominously as she ran a hand along the dark wood of staircase bannister and thought unpleasantly of time served in scholastic penance at a girls’ public even more annoyingly posh than Sulgrave. _Sending you there was the biggest mistake of my life,_ her mother had said, as if the curriculum had included master classes in lesbianism—even though Caroline still considers two hours spent in bed with the rugby team captain an exemplary introduction to the subject; the price of exposure and near-expulsion well worth it.

Still, a lack of Sapphism 101 seems another resounding failure of the British education system.

Gillian Greenwood’s office now induces further flashbacks, this time of her own headteacher’s office some thirty years ago and with the phrases _homosexual liaisons_ and _grounds for expulsion_ thrown about with the carefree ease of beads at a Mardi Gras festival, except that instance had been threaded together with feverish condemnation and not exultant hedonism. Her father had been cross about the money required to hush up the affair and to keep her in the school, but also surprisingly sympathetic: _As a victim of my own indiscretion, dear, all I can say is—do be more careful, would you?_ Which, perhaps erroneously, she interpreted as: _When you’re a terribly closeted adult, marry an oblivious alcoholic writer as cover._

In the past six months since her first encounter with Gillian at the school’s holiday party, her divorce has grown more acrimonious, her younger son more obstreperous, her lover infinitely less patient; as culmination of these festering emotive states she is broke, wants to murder Lawrence if only on occasion, and is tragically single.

On the pretext of accepting a job offer at her alma mater, Kate had scarpered back to Durham. Unsurprisingly, Caroline’s vague, desperate entreaties reflected not so much a lack of awareness but a refusal to acknowledge culpability; she had to venture beyond admitting her own selfishness and simply could not figure out how to accomplish that. It seemed far easier to blame Kate for a certain high-minded impatience that she displayed when confronted with a great many human foibles.

The last time they saw each other had been at a coffee shop in Durham proper nearly three months ago. Caroline had snagged an invite to a functional organic materials symposium at the university—not that she really gave a shit about functional organic materials, but it provided a perfect opportunity for a last-ditch attempt at reconciliation.

Sitting forlorn over a cappuccino—and Caroline was at least heartened by her misery—Kate had stared out the window for an unnervingly long time before taking up the verbal scalpel in a relationship postmortem of which Caroline was deliriously clueless: “You ceaselessly talk about working on it—our relationship, your issues—and working on it, and working on it, and then you don’t do shit about anything because you only live by the unattainable idea of it all in your bloody head.”

She had a lot of nerve, insinuating that Caroline was some sort of idealist. Then she mentioned with casual cruelness that she was having a long-distance fling with a police sergeant—“although I suspect she’s even more fucked up than you are”—and that was that.

Speaking of fucked up, she wonders what Gillian Greenwood’s issues are if a flask at work is some sort of necessity. A generous amber tipple of what she assumes is whiskey flows into a teacup. “You actually keep liquor here,” she wonders aloud.

“After hours now. I’m off the clock.” Gillian settles back into an ergonomic desk chair, an ugly modernist throne all mesh and plastic and weird knobs. Despite the semi-ludicrous chair, she still emanates a sense of authority: a weary corporate magnate graciously granting a last-minute audience at the end of the day, a captain of industry who has gamely rolled up the sleeves of her immaculate, navy blue silk shirt as she digs into the intestinal blood and guts of the education system.

Too distracted by muscular forearms, strong wrists, and a conspicuously shiny TAG Heuer watch, Caroline cannot summon forth the prelude and pretense of small talk—not that she ever could under the best of circumstances. “So the board—”

She must wait for Gillian to knock back the contents of the cup. “They won’t waive the fee, Caroline. I’m sorry.”

“I know Lawrence didn’t do well on the entrance exam.”

Quite unnecessarily—and with a touch of arrogance—she is corrected. “He _failed_ the entrance exam.”

“I’m sure he wasn’t the first—”

Gillian pours more salt into the wound and more booze into the teacup. “His score set a record low.”

“He’s been struggling a lot this past year. With the divorce and all.”

“I see. Must be why he called me a stroppy old mingy cunt.”

Caroline pinches the bridge of her nose. “Yeah, I know, I know. Sorry about that.”

“Not the first time it’s happened,” Gillian says cheerfully. “Won’t be the last.”

“But look, his brother went here. I thought that would count for something.”

“It can’t be the only criteria. We need to enforce standards.”

“Y’know, the fact that you look so sincere while reciting such twaddle is really impressive. I know that’s your job. This is all about money.”

“I don’t make the rules,” Gillian sighs.

“I know.”

“You really don’t have it?” She supposes Gillian is attempting to open some sort of helpful inquiry into her finances, but instead the question rings with hearty skepticism.

“I’m in the middle of an acrimonious divorce with a drunken tosspot with whom I made the shitty mistake of sharing various bank accounts and a multitude of credit cards.” Caroline leaves out the bit about John also being utterly broke and unable to offer any kind of financial support whatsoever because, in addition to all this, he is being sued by his ex-lover, who has now claimed authorship of his last novel. At the moment she has just enough saved to cover Lawrence’s first year here; some sodding random exorbitant robber baron fee was not an out-of-pocket expense she had expected. Her only recourse will be groveling to her mother for the money.

Gillian is rather good at looking imperious; these discomfiting glances have no doubt rendered a fair number of students into awkward deaf mutes or stammering, blithering idiots. “Even with your fancy engineering job, that big house of yours on the market?”

Ah, the familiar refrain of class resentment that even a luxury Swiss watch can’t assuage. “I see we’re speaking frankly now.”

“We weren’t before?”

“Polite. You were being polite.”

“Am I supposed to be a bitch, then?” Gillian glances at her over the rim of whiskey’ed teacup. “What exactly do you want me to be, Caroline? How can I best behave that would suit you?”

Despite presentation in smooth, even-toned passive-aggressiveness, these are good questions.

Whenever Caroline feels the crushing boot of expectation and responsibility on her neck—as she does now—she yearns for a reckless escape. No one will save her now, so she must save herself. It’s why she left her blouse strategically unbuttoned today (top two undone, hint of a pushup black lace bra), why the playback of what Kate said months ago has been part of an interior soundtrack for days; it gives her shaky courage to risk all with one ridiculous fucking move. It doesn’t quite explain why she ever thought it prudent to aggressively snog her girlfriend with copious amounts of tongue in front of this woman, who manages to be both wary as a cornered fox and pursuant as the finest hound. Anything with a pulse? She can’t wait to find out.

So she leans forward and hopes her tits will carry the day. “Well. To start, perhaps we could come to an arrangement, of sorts?”

Gillian stiffens, her brow twitches, and Caroline interprets these minute signals vibrating through the air as an attempt to smother genuine astonishment. The ugly chair creaks in a half turn toward the window as she looks away.

“You picked up on it.” There is an appropriate note of wonder in her voice.

For a long moment, Caroline savors it: the exquisiteness of being properly caught out, the acute freefall of everything slipping through her grasp. The heat on her neck radiates, loosens the long-simmering tension throughout her body, and precipitates a state of surrender. “I did.”

Gillian is silent for a long minute as she stares out the window. “I wasn’t sure.” A quick, rueful smile. “You like playing the principled, high-minded bitch. Don’t you? But that night you were showing off, kissing your girlfriend like that, giving me a look. Like a fucking tease.” She shakes her head. “And then I spent months wondering if there was more to it than that.”

Caroline hesitates to say for certain, but she’s still not sure what that look was about. Most definitely she was showing off; taunting, even. Those who are fortunate always piss away their power in one way or another. From such great heights, one never properly conceives of the fall. Her breath shallows out and despite a force of effort clarity of thought is not forthcoming, an imaginary plumb line cannot detect the depths of anything here.

Frowning at the floor, Gillian says, flatly, “So you’re saying you’ll fuck me if I sort it somehow. Get your son into this school. Is that it?”

Admitting to it aloud and on the record is, Caroline knows, a dangerous thing. No one else witnesses this conversation, but granting the proposition the weight of actual words compromises her in a way she’s not quite ready to concede. “Perhaps—we both need some time to think things over? It might grant a different perspective.”

She stands and Gillian—propelled by abrupt, coiled energy—follows her to the door. Her hand is on the knob and Gillian’s hand splays across the door. It will happen, this she knows. There is nothing to do but accept the artless plunge into new intimacy: Gillian pins her against the door, strong hands binding Caroline’s wrists against dark, heavy wood. This close, the woman is a feast for the senses: her rough touch and the heat of her body, her anger; her sweat mingled with soap or shampoo and breath with the sweet knife of whiskey; the snarling disdain of her mouth; the blaze of her eyes. Then Caroline realizes she is at the banquet not as a guest but rather the meal itself, fit for—a wolf, a queen? She vacillates, unable to pin anything noteworthy on Gillian except beauty, all this furious beauty.

“You really think,” Gillian says shakily, “I’d risk my job, my professional reputation, everything I’ve worked for—just to have it off with you?”

She is close enough to kiss, but only teases with defiant clarification. “Yeah,” Caroline replies. “I do.”

Roughly Gillian releases her and she is disappointed. They stare at each other. With one hand Gillian cups her face—not harshly, not gently, but with effortless command that suggests it is a familiar opening salvo for impromptu seduction—drags a thumb across her lips, and kisses her, open-mouthed, raw, demanding. It’s been a long time since anyone has kissed her like quite this, without the imprimatur of imagined futures or ruinous consequences. In past beginnings with new lovers, Caroline has been treated with the necessary caution typically bestowed upon hazardous waste; she has never understood why. Gillian suffers from no such circumspection, attaches neither future nor past: Her hand is up Caroline’s skirt and caressing her ass before sliding around front and diving between the thighs. Getting shagged by a headteacher in a very proper dark-paneled office is common enough fodder for fantasy, and while she’s wetter than she’s willing to admit and mindlessly pushing against Gillian’s hand, she’s not willing to be de-pantied just yet because she doesn’t want this bitch to get ideas that she’s completely running the show. So her only recourse is deliverance of a message— _you’re not as in charge as you think, even though I like this a lot_ —through a kiss: She sinks her teeth into Gillian’s lower lip until the tender bloom of salt and blood fills her mouth and it’s good, so good, that if not pinned to the door, she would fall to her knees in hopes, however vain and desperate, of tasting more of this woman.

Gillian releases a startled _ah_ of pain and pulls away, touches her lip—and laughs, grinning devilishly, at the watery blot of blood on her finger. “Well now. Your ex did say you like it rough sometimes, so more the fool me.”

Derisively, Caroline sputters a laugh. “Am I supposed to be surprised you fucked my husband?” When deep in the cups John’s taste in women ran to the unpredictable and the indiscriminate. She hopes he is grateful that any woman would shag him after listening to sodden (and inaccurate) recitation of Philip Larkin poems, not to mention the pathetic _my wife is a hopeless lesbian and won’t sleep with me anymore_ spiels, all of which he has compiled and submitted as a epic prose poem to the _Paris Review._ Yet even in the trenches of divorce she still thinks of him as somehow belonging to her, much in the way one does the ancient, bug-infested loveseat moldering in a basement that saw one through university and early adult poverty. “I know what he’s like and I’ve heard what you’re like.”

Gillian chuckles low and dirty and, flashing her lovely teeth, returns the nip: savagely she tears at Caroline’s ear and hisses into it, “Wrong ex.”


	4. maybe baby, the gypsy lied

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to my muse LN James and her spiritual boyfriend Bruce for chapter title inspiration.

Driving While Furious is technically not a crime in the United Kingdom, but in the past Caroline has unfortunately discovered that doing so leads to all sorts of complications and consequences. Last year, while arguing with John on her mobile, she rear-ended a van belonging to a local wine-shop owner. To her astonishment the woman interpreted the accident as some sort of angry middle-aged lesbian courting ritual and showed up at the house days later with a crate of fine red and looking far more radiant than she had any right to be. They went to bed that same afternoon, and that’s where John discovered them when he arrived home that evening. While it proved to be the final straw on a stack of mutual infidelities, it did not prevent him from nicking several of her newly gifted wine bottles before he moved out at the end of the week. Two months later she met Kate at a bar; this seemed the silver lining to eighteen years of dysfunctional heterosexuality.

She should have fucking known better.

The meeting with Gillian leaves her reeling. Emotionally she goes from zero to a hundred in two seconds, from yearning to take that snotty bitch on her desk until she begs for mercy to wanting to punch her smug but still-disturbingly-handsome face.

Surely she would not be lucky enough to crash into another beautiful woman’s vehicle—what the hell was that woman’s name again?—so she actually stops off at a Wetherspoons for a drink, the soul-draining blandness of the place with its tinny chrome finishes and eighties rock a requisite for drunk-dialing one’s ex. Under the oppressive weight of the art form known as the power ballad— _I’m finding it hard to believe we’re in heaven because you take my breath away and it must’ve been love but it’s over now but I’ll keep on loving you and won’t you even try to give a little bit of heart and soul and don’t you make me beg for more_ —she waits patiently for complete emotional collapse. Thinking of all the perms she endured during the ascent of the power ballad era does not help. The bartender feels bad for her; the second glass of cabernet is on the house. After that, she is finally prepared to leave a fuck-and-fury-studded voicemail on Kate’s mobile when, to her amazement, the woman herself answers the call. But then Kate is one of those conscientious types who dutifully answers all personal phone calls; she’d have to be dead or bleeding to death otherwise, and it is what Caroline has always loved and resented about her.

Indeed, when Kate picks up she sounds so solicitous and concerned it is unbearable. “Caroline? Is everything okay?”

For a scant second, this note of genuine emotion throws her off the dogged pursuit of judicious self-righteousness. But the jealousy— _of who, of what?_ a mocking voice pipes up—roars through her veins more than the tepid red blend of blood and wine therein. Awkwardly she slides off the barstool, nearly twisting her ankle in the process, and finds a quiet niche in the corridor leading to the ladies’ room. “You slept with her. You fucking slept with her.”

A sigh tears at the connection. “Oh. God. She told you. Didn’t she?”

“Yes, she fucking told me.”

Another sigh. “And you’re drunk.”

“Yes I’m fucking drunk because _I don’t fucking_ _believe this,_ okay?”

“I’m sorry—no, hang on, what am I apologizing for? Look.” As usual, Kate’s sense of outrage takes a moment to catch up to her gentle good manners. “I don’t owe you a bloody explanation. I don’t owe you anything. But just for the record—not because I think it will give you peace of mind to know, because you are the _least_ peaceful person _I_ know—it was just a one-off. It happened after we broke up.”

“Oh great. Sure. Now you’re going to tell me you were pissed when it happened and it was horrible.”

A long pause, then: “It was not horrible.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“And I was pissed,” Kate continues, “and she was too. It was my last day at Sulgrave Heath. There was a party, then a group of us went down to the pub, and then it was down to just us two and—God, how much detail do you want, Caroline? Do you want to know if we shagged in the loo? Her car? My flat? All of the above? What do you hope to gain out of this? What do you want?”

Caroline is silent. Like a numb, sleepy limb twitching itself to life, a moment of sobriety sends a thousand pinpricks gallivanting along the nape of her neck.

“Well?” Kate prompts, and more gently than she deserves. “Are you still there?”

“I thought—”

“What?”

“I thought I wanted you.”

Her thumb smears across the red dot on the mobile’s screen, she slumps against a wall and the hallway is filled with the effluvium of disinfectant and acrid, fake-berry air freshener; meanwhile Bruce Springsteen sorrowfully tells her that maybe baby, the gypsy lied and she finally remembers the name of that woman—Olga—whose van she plowed into, and that she still had Olga’s number in her contacts list.   


	5. reinventing oxygen

On a Saturday morning, the chair of Sulgrave Heath’s board of governors calls. His name is James St. Something-Something, at least Kate always called him that because “he’s so important, at least in his own mind, that he should be named twice.”

He trills on the phone with the bonhomie of that person who has always lived a better than the person he speaks with, and in his enthusiasm to share the carefully portioned spoils of his privilege sprinkles inflection over random words like a celebrity chef who habitually overseasons everything: “The acceptance letter and paperwork went out in the post yesterday, but I wanted to call and say _congratulations—_ Lawrence has been accepted for this academic year. I know this is _all_ rather last minute, and I trust not _dreadfully_ inconvenient, but there is a mixer we have every year for the new parents to meet the faculty and other parents, and I _know_ you already know Mrs. Greenwood—well, no need to be over-formal now, _Gillian_ —”

“Oh fuck,” Caroline blurts as the dual shock of Gillian’s name, so casually dropped, and Lawrence getting into the bloody school make her wish she hadn’t made a pledge to cease day-drinking.

“Oh.” It’s the kind of distressed yet suppressed surprise that only white English people do so well, then punctuated by another classic behavior of the upper classes: the awkward titter. “I was _so_ rather hoping you’d be pleased!”

She scrambles to offer verbal genuflection. “I am. No, I am, really. It’s wonderful news. I’m so grateful, and I can’t wait to tell Lawrence.” Actually, she can because he’s still asleep and if she even attempts waking him, it’s likely he will fling obscenities and an Xbox console at her head. “Thank you.”

“Oh _wonderful._ So! I hope this means you’ll attend our little soiree?”

“Um.” Caroline stares at her coffee mug, which depicts the molecular structure of caffeine—a gift from Kate. At times in the past few weeks she’s thought about hurling it across the room, but in spite of the depressing romantic history attached, she rather likes it.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity to meet some of the faculty, and other parents,” he says. “Well. _Do_ think about it, will you? We would _love_ to meet you in person.”

“I will. Thank you.”  

She rings off, stares at the mug. Caffeine. Coffee. Chemistry. Fucking Gillian Greenwood. Both literally and figuratively.

Five minutes later she calls John and delivers the news: “He got in.”

To John’s credit, he manages genuine enthusiasm regarding his son while hungover at 9:30 in the morning on a Saturday. He may have been a shit husband, but generally acquits himself well as a father, even while heaving a sigh of relief over their obstreperous child. “Oh, thank God. But—great! That’s great. Does he know?”

“Just found out, and he’s not awake yet. So look—there’s some sort of bloody party, some school function, before the year begins. Do you want to go to it?”

“What? With—you?”

“Of course not with me, you drunken shit-bucket.”

“Oh, I see. Classic you: You don’t want to go, so you’re foisting it off on me.”

“You’re better at these things than I am.” She wonders if whining still works on him.

It doesn’t. “You always say that about shit you don’t want to do. Well guess what, you mad old dyke, I’ve been going to all the school functions, all the fundraisers and parents’ night and teachers’ meetings for years whenever you couldn’t be bothered because you were reinventing oxygen or whatever the fuck it is that you do—”

Caroline clutches her precious jokey molecule mug. “Oh fuck off, don’t get angry with me because you don’t understand my job, let alone _basic principles of chemistry_.”

“—and it’s your turn to do it this time. It sucks. I went to the damned thing when Will got in and it was full of rich tosspots and hosted by that weirdo chair of the board and his wife, she’s a baroness or whatever, but they’re both kinky bisexuals, so you’ll fit right in.”

“How do _you_ know they’re kinky bisexuals?”

“Well, if you actually, you know, acted like a parent and went to the sodding school events you’d have all the proper intel, wouldn’t you?”

“I went to the Christmas party,” she retorts lamely.

“You only went because your precious girlfriend was teaching there and you probably went down on her in the rugby pavilion.”

She never should have told him about the rugby captain. “Okay, fine, but this thing—is it really necessary?”  

John sighs heavily. “Jesus Christ, Caroline. If I’m somehow functioning as your moral bellwether these days, you are well and truly fucked.”  


	6. the idyllists

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Country life. 
> 
> (Apologies if I did a shit job proofing this.)

“You must be Caroline Dawson. The one who’s Gillian’s friend?”

The woman who answers the door of James St. Something-Something’s country house is tall, thin, and wearing a stylish, shapeless, sleeveless linen dress. As a rule, Caroline loathes thin people who dare to dress comfortably; punishment for adherence to mainstream beauty standards should be mandatory and they should all smother to death in miserable inventions of haute couture.

“You must be using the word ‘friend’ very loosely,” Caroline replies.

The woman laughs nervously, loudly. She introduces herself as Eleanor— _the kinky bisexual baroness wife, right?_ Caroline wants to say—and leads Caroline through the old house, gorgeous even in the midst of a shambolic renovation, that is her family’s inheritance: high ceilinged rooms with peeling plaster, half-exposed brick walls, threadbare curtains, late summer sun slashing through long windows, all of it of part and parcel of a past that wears well, even as time continually strips away its deceptive, decorous sumptuousness. With the pedigree of its English bones exposed, the house possesses more power and worth now than it did when it was first built, and in the topsy-turvy landscape of the English class system, it is precisely for this reason that she and her husband cling to it, even though they can barely afford it.

“We’re fixing it up,” Eleanor says apologetically. “Some rooms are better than others. I’ll be giving a little tour later—you _might_ enjoy it. The drawing room and the library have some _fascinating_ paintings.”

Jesus-of-course-Christ, she sounds just like her husband. As Caroline thinks this James, the affable host, glides in, introduces himself, rests a hand just above her ass and offers her wine, which is about the only thing that prevents her from breaking his wrist. Rosé, of course. It will do. Then she runs into Michael Dobson, a teacher at Sulgrave Heath and an old friend of Kate’s. He pretends to be sad they’ve broken up. She drinks half the rosé. He hints that Kate is already seeing someone else. She says she knows and drinks the other half. He implies that Kate has slept with Gillian. She says she knows that too and to please fuck off. He fucks off. She waves down James and asks for a gin and tonic. After twenty minutes of talking to a young man who’s been droning on about bitcoin, Eleanor’s possibly agonizing art tour starts to look good. She cadges a cigarette from the future bitcoin overlord and heads out to the terrace.

This is where Gillian, making a fashionably late arrival, finds her half an hour later: Emerging from French doors, walking across the flagstones, squinting into the sunset, and wearing another beautiful suit—this one a soft dark gray linen with a white silk shirt underneath. Even students in the academic dregs of a summer session benefit from her class-conscious impeccable taste; and yet in contrast to certain quasi-bohemian baroness landowners, Gillian’s fashion sense does not irritate. She’s holding a glass of something clear—slice of lime buoyed on ice cubes—and Caroline recalls the first time they met, how she admired the cut of Gillian’s jacket, the perfect taper of the sleeve, the cuff hitting her wrist just so, the easy way she handled a wineglass. All of it too practiced and perfect, a slightly wrecked and damaged elegance that, like the house they’re at, is a voluptuous suggestion of a beautiful subterranean history, a pagan fresco unearthed in a dark catacomb. Gillian would be an acolyte of Dionysius, she thinks, cradling a golden cup. The tricks and favors of the violet hour—such a whore you are, Caroline thinks, sneering accusatively at the lavender sky going seductively dark—deepen the intensity of Gillian’s eyes. With each and every perceptible movement they vacillate between glinting and smoldering, between the wide wild world of a first spark and a heap of glowing embers.

She snags Caroline’s cigarette. “Having a good time?”

“No.”

“Really? James and Eleanor like you.”

“That’s nice. Tell me, do you fuck your bosses as much as you do your subordinates?”

Her eyes never leave Caroline’s face as she takes a deep drag off the cigarette and caresses the smoke in her open mouth. The nacreous cloud undulates violently, a storm front raging beautifully, and Caroline yearns desperately for something so intangible: to taste the rich opalescence simmering in her mouth, to suck it from the very marrow of her bones.

Then Gillian exhales, breaking the spell. “Still mad about that, eh?”

“You here to collect payment?” Do I sound hopeful? she wonders.

Gillian's frown is a mockery of thoughtfulness, vacillating between amusement and pity because she wants what she wants. “Payment for what? I’d nothing to do with Lawrence getting in.”

“Then how did he get in?”

“A spot opened up. Someone withdrew at the last moment. There is a waiting list, of course. Lawrence’s application had arrived well before the deadline, so he was at the top of the list. So. There he is and here you are.” She looks out into the garden. “I can show you around the house, if you like. I’ve stayed here many weekends. In fact—” Gillian takes a quick hit off the cigarette, displaying an indecorous hint of impatience, before handing it back to Caroline. “—I’m staying here this weekend.”

“Aw bless, you’re a modern-day courtier to the shabby-genteel aristocrats.” Caroline takes one final drag off the cigarette before dunking it into Gillian’s drink, where it releases a violent hiss. A panoply of imagined reactions flit across her mind: booze tossed in face, slapped, kissed. What a precise, pleasing order that would be.

Instead, Gillian grants her the devil’s grin again. “You know—”

“What?”

The befouled tumbler, with cigarette crash-landed into the lime, is toasted mockingly. “James told me to bring this out to you. Plymouth and tonic, I believe?”

Then Eleanor appears, flanked by the open doors, and calls out to them: “ _There_ you are! Interested in the taking the grand tour, Caroline? Gillian, darling, I know this is _old hat_ for you, but _do_ come along.”

The drawing room is, of course, painted in standard country-house red, a snooze-worthy shade that reminds Caroline of every boring museum she’s ever been dragged through. The walls are chock-a-block with landscape paintings spanning the nineteenth and early twentieth century; the cumulative tedium of style lessens the impact of each individual painting. Yet every one echoes an amaranthine story: country life, idylls slipped and slipping away, time captured and released into the wild of memory, the transgressions of the seasons—summer wears autumn’s crown, spring tugs as winter’s petticoats. The seasons mutate; the story does not.

Eleanor stands in front of a dozen other guests, all sweaty and clutching glasses clustered with pearls of condensation. She waves ineffectually at a painting. “This is an _underrated_ example of the Norwich School of Painting. You see the Netherlandish influences _quite_ clearly in both the execution and subject matter. It was the first provincial art movement in England—compare this, over here, with the Idyllists of the Victorian era, and we see _rural idealism_ infused with a more _social realism,_ an emerging modern consciousness.”

Like bored teenaged miscreants on a field trip, Caroline and Gillian hang back from the small gathering. Before the tour started Gillian had swapped out the ruined gin and tonic for a fresh one of her own, half of which was downed and abandoned before the tour began. As the room approaches the unbearable side of stuffy, Caroline feels a sweaty mustache on her upper lip and sheds her light cardigan, hoping that any random judgment of her pale, freckled arms, less tan and toned than the hostess’s—or any of the strapping, disciplined gym mums present for that matter—will be merciful. “She must have a bloody art history degree,” she murmurs to Gillian.

“Spot on.” Gillian’s voice, droll and detached, drifts over Caroline. Gillian stands behind her, poised to pour rebellion, bad advice, come-ons in her left ear like an reprobate, gin-soused, juniper-breathed angel.

Nervous, Caroline plucks at a button on the cardigan draped over her arm, sweats too much even as the hair on her arms stand at attention because she is acutely aware of Gillian’s closeness; all of it twines together as a fuse fit for lighting. “Did you fuck them both?” she continues in the same low, matter-of-fact tone.

“Just the once.”

“Really? At one go? Threesome?”

“That was enough.”

“Why?”

“They’re very demanding. Takers, not givers.”

“So it wasn’t good?”

“She’s very energetic and he—”

“Yes?”

“Well. He makes a good cuppa.”

Caroline’s laughter goes from sputter to full-on cackle and bounces off two centuries of mediocre paintings.

Eleanor glances at them, painfully, politely confused.

“Sorry, Eleanor. Sorry,” Gillian manages to say around a fit of giggles. Caroline covers her mouth, nods apologetically.

Momentarily appeased, the hostess blathers on.

With a sigh, Caroline regroups. But while she stares, unfocused, at a painting of workers baling hay, Gillian’s fingers course a slow, downward path along the zipper of her dress. A minor painting, a major shift: Green and gold, seasons passing, she cannot breathe, she cannot think. Silent signals transmitted through one gentle, assured touch, the expert leaving of indelible traces, a detail in her life as fine and seemingly insignificant as the crosshatching in a Durer engraving; the latter reverberates depth and complexity throughout centuries, the former will only haunt her as a cherished memory at the end of her life: _the way you touched me, here, now._

With a blind grasp she reaches behind and intercepts Gillian’s hand; fingers curl into her palm. Eleanor expounds upon the Idyllists and stumbles into an unforeseen argument with a Sulgrave art teacher— _but do you really believe Walker superior to Pinwell?_ —as Caroline allows herself to be led out of the room. As they leave she thinks she sees one of Eleanor’s dark eyebrows alight into the territory of curiosity.

In a secluded stairway leading to what was once a servants’ hall, they kiss and in the shadows and distant clatter of voices and music dwells a monastic reprieve from the party, from everything. There is nothing but the smell of woodsoap, the taste of Gillian’s mouth hot and sweet, the rustle and press of clothes and bodies and that feeling she experienced in Gillian’s office—the delectable attenuation to everything slipping through her fingers—rises up within her once again.

Upstairs, the bedroom light stays off. Instead, light pools in from long windows, an amalgamation of dotted lamplights near the patio and garden, moonlight, hazy highway lights from afar. Distant light, distant lives. _Light light light_ Odysseus screamed when the truth buried in his bones revealed itself. What’s bred in the bone outs in the flesh and a moment of instinctual truth arrives, not with a Greek chorus in attendance but only modest fanfare—the sound of Gillian’s watch clinking atop a table. The window reflects a dream landscape of the garden transmogrified into chess pieces and phantasms and the dim overlay of the dress she is moments from shedding.

Gillian is against her, touches her hip. The zipper hitches, then surrenders. She smells of smoke and sweat and night—or is that me? Caroline wonders—and she doesn’t bother to push aside Caroline’s hair when she presses a kiss at the back of her neck. The dress sloughs off, a lifetime of perpetual expectations dead and weightless at her feet. She flexes a calf to kick off her shoes only to hear _heels, please_ murmured into her throat. She keeps them on. Gillian kisses her neck, her shoulders, a garrulous tongue runs fluent in lust along her skin, laps up sweat and longing and summer. Caroline hopes that she tastes like all of these things, hopes that she would burst in succulent ripeness in Gillian’s mouth. The gossamer skin of her panties tighten in a fist, knuckles rub against her skin. Her forehead rests against the windowpane; she is braced against the window’s ledge with the warmth of summer trapped in the pane until it rises against her cheek, with wine swimming through her veins. Fingers fumble and tease at her opening and glide inside her and she pushes, holds a savoring embrace, moves slow, then faster until she’s close—and then Gillian pulls out, strokes her just so, until her cries fog the window, and the panes trembles perceptibly with her breath, with a vibrato that she imagines will be trapped in time with the tableaux of this night.

She wonders why she’s not falling and realizes Gillian is holding her up with one strong arm around her waist, one hand still nestled between her thighs, her damp fingers catch and drag against Caroline’s skin in the spiraling of a slow caress.

The afterglow finds them tangled and staggering toward the bed and Caroline demonstrates complete disregard for that fine linen jacket, that creamy silk shirt. She sits on the bed, pulls Gillian closer so that she is eye level with a belt. In the light Gillian’s torso is milky blue, quivering with each anticipatory breath. Caroline unbuckles the trousers, plucks open the fly, stops, and gazes up. Gillian’s face is in shadows, eyelids at sensual half-mast; the queen before the feast, the wolf biding at the door.

She draws an imaginary line across the top of Gillian’s underwear—dark, enticing—fingers dip in teasingly and discover a bounty of soft hair, which is relief after encountering so many women who view the hair of that region as something to be groomed and sculpted to either prepubescent nonexistence or the ostentatious precision of the gardens at Versailles. At last, something and someone real, confounding all expectations.

So she ensnares Gillian by the waistband and tosses her on the bed. It’s not the reverent, tender, de-panting so clearly expected, nor the acquiescence of the played-out scenario. Sometimes, she thinks while climbing up Gillian very slowly, the wolf can be the prey, and skin the intaglio bearing the marks of her mouth, the design of her desire—the kissing and biting that leads her face to face with a queen. Who smiles at her.

“You,” Gillian says, her breathing more urgent with each and every soft, astonished laugh. “You’re just like I hoped you’d be. Full of surprises.”

She slides a hand down the crevasse of Gillian’s trousers, teases, makes a retreat, and then lays definitive claim for the night: starts fucking her slowly with an insouciance that makes her beg, stops again, gets a _please_ —that was quick, she thinks, didn’t think I’d get one so soon—then takes her higher, faster, closer, and stops, awaiting a glittering chain of inaudibly humble pleas beating against her skin and writhing around her throat and chest like a splendid, knotted length of pearls. Underneath her, Gillian is as stiff and trembling as a divining rod; her hands sift and pull at Caroline’s hair, her heels anchor into the mattress.

“You’re goddamned right I am,” Caroline whispers, and finishes her off.


	7. the house is on instagram now

The evening before, the curtains were not drawn. So as morning shakes itself out from the brambles of night, the bedroom is suffused with an opaline glow and Caroline blinks, squints, and stumbles into a new day. The first thing registered are the tops of deep green trees glazed orange and gold by sunrise; the aureate light of fall’s crown. The quiet pace of an autumn phase will begin soon; the unrequited joy and ache in the passing of time remains unchanged.

The second thing: Her hands are tied together with her own bra.

Sitting up too fast gets a blood rush to the head that fades everything like a dated Polaroid. She flexes her hands, twists her wrists, flutters her fingers. Everything still works, at least above the waist. She tries to pull apart or loosen the knot. Of course, the bitch would tie perfect knots. It wasn’t the kind of thing she was normally into, but when a naked woman flashes a charming smile and offers tender assurances that what follows will be well worth one’s time and trouble, one cannot help but be the most obliging of bottoms. The deprivation of touch, the submission of granting someone she hardly knew unbridled access to her body heightened every sense. Kissing alone left her panting and begging please into Gillian’s mouth—more accurately, “please get on with it,” which seemed a slightly bitchy request for someone at the tender mercy of a stern headmistress, and for that transgression every body part endured epic sensual torture and teasing that led her to the satiated endpoint of sweaty raw exhaustion, and with both bound hands clinging to a poster of the bed for dear life.

 _Jesus,_ she finally said.

Perhaps the euphoria of domination went to Gillian’s head, because she got cheeky. _Funny. I always get mistaken for that bloke in these situations._

Regardless, it was well earned: _All right. You. Amazing. You’re amazing._

_Thanks. And thank you for not killing me with your thighs._

She’d gotten a tad carried away during the home stretch of a particularly pleasing climax and could not control the involuntary clenching and flexing of her legs, which prompted a loud protest of “oi” from the vicinity of her cunt during the crucial moment.

_You’re welcome. So._

Gillian hummed questioningly, sleepily.

_Could you—untie me now?_

_Sure. Just a mmm—_ then a soft sigh, another hum, gave way to the coda of sleep.

 _Well shit,_ Caroline had thought, and then also fell asleep.

Now Gillian is sprawled out next to her, face down, still sound asleep, the splendor of her backside a more pleasing work of art than anything hanging in the rooms downstairs. As Caroline stares, her brain helplessly picks up a pattern of snoring: a fuzzy monotone for nearly a full minute, a silent hitch, then a startling noise that sounds like _snork!_  

The logical thing to do would be to wake Gillian, so that she could be untied. But that would lead to very awkward postcoital conversations and the possibility of more sex—the latter definitely not a bad thing, but sooner or later her mother and son will glance up from their respective electronic devices, realize they are hungry, and finally notice that the middle-aged crank who cooks for them is not at home.

_Snork!_

Instead she scampers like a field mouse fleeing the country for good, or perhaps like Morrissey bolting out of Manchester, and begins frantically retrieving clothes from the floor as if they are items in a sexual scavenger hunt: torn stockings, crumpled underwear, the woman-made lake of her dress, sweater, heels. Cradling this bundle with still-tied hands, she silently dashes out of the bedroom while completely, utterly aware that she is starkers in the hallway of a strange house and has no idea where the bloody bathroom is.

When she reaches the end of the hallway with nary a loo in sight—the faint but jaunty strains of a Beethoven concerto floating up the staircase provide an appropriate farcical soundtrack—she confesses to herself that this is a terrifically bad idea. But that does not stop her from running in the opposite direction, where two doors past the bedroom where Gillian snores contentedly she finds an unoccupied, bright bathroom of exquisitely mismatched Carrara marble and Moroccan tiles. Once inside she dumps the clothes on the beautiful marble counter, then fumbles and flails furiously at her knotted wrists. After so much flexing and twisting and awkward plucking at the knot, it’s finally loose enough so that she can undo it with her teeth.

She washes up. Certain things, however, cannot be washed away—memory, touch, bruises on thighs, hickeys on breasts. She attempts to brush her teeth and tongue with a dollop of toothpaste on a finger. She dresses, even though the bra seems permanently stretched out now. Bins the torn stockings. Realizes she cannot properly zip herself up; never the mind, the sweater will cover her back.

And remembers that her purse, and the mobile within it, are in a desk drawer in the locked study downstairs. Well, it was locked last night; perhaps it would be open by now.

“Fuck,” she says aloud. As in a Hollywood adventure film, the narrow escape has been made, but the mission is not yet complete.

“I’m going in,” she tells the mirror.

You’re a slaggy idiot, the mirror replies.

“I know,” she sighs and, cradling her heels, struts out of the bathroom.

Downstairs, she finds the house looking even more enchantingly rundown in daylight. No one is about in the main hall and the breadcrumbs of Beethoven, unfortunately, lead right to the book-lined study. With no small amount of dread, she creeps toward the open door while rehearsing a brief morning salutation: _Hi, I thoroughly fucked your houseguest for the weekend, hope you don’t mind, I’ll be going now._ But on this warm, sunny morning the French doors of the study are flung open and its occupant, James, is outside chatting on his mobile. From the doorway of the study Caroline sees him pacing, flip flops slapping authoritatively on flagstones.

“A k-hole is nothing to _laugh_ about, Graham,” James chastises.

As the bloviating continues, Caroline darts in, opens the huge bottom drawer of the desk, and finds her purse—one of many last night, but the only one present this morning. With purse tucked into one arm and her heels in another, she runs out of the study and races down the hall. She imagines the exhilaration, the adrenaline burning through her similar to what her college fling Pauline experienced when plowing down the rugby pitch and scoring a—whatever. But did they have two balls, or only the one?

The goal line—home line? touchdown? touchpad? oh fuck it—is in sight when a trilling voice ripples down the hallway in shameless pursuit of her shameful ass: “Good morning, Caroline!”

Of course, it’s fucking Eleanor and for the hundredth time this morning, Caroline thinks _fuck_ as she skids, stops, and spins around with such fluid grace that she is almost impressed with herself, and then forces a ridiculous smile on her face. “Hi. Eleanor. Thanks for—a really, really lovely time last night. And the house is fabulous. I have to be going now, so—”

Eleanor smiles and to Caroline’s amazement, she is wearing the same dress she wore last night and Caroline thinks all sorts of time-challenged Hotel California-haunted house scenarios in which she will remain here forever and perpetually, sexually sacrificed to every houseguest. Maybe that’s why Gillian lured her here; by shagging her, Gillian has been freed from the curse of being the eternal household succubus. She will be stuck here forever.

“Wouldn’t you like an espresso first?” Ever the nervous, fanatical hostess, Eleanor holds aloft a pretty demitasse cup on a saucer and now Caroline wonders if she spends every morning after a party combing the premises for stray hungover guests—or for the happy few fortunately fucked by Gillian Greenwood, who definitely require rousing with a complimentary cup of coffee.  

“No, I’m fine, really. Thanks.” Half-heartedly Caroline jogs toward the door but gives up quickly because Eleanor is gliding toward her with the unerring speed of a French waiter in a race. 

“I made this for James, but please _do_ have it.” Eleanor says, and adds pointedly, “I think you could use it.” She frowns. “I say. Do you need some _help_ with your dress? You seem a bit, shall we say, dishabille.”

“Um. Er. Ah.”

“Please.” Eleanor says, and Caroline swears to God she’s batting her eyelashes. “Allow me.”

Caroline wonders if this is how Gillian got seduced— _dear heavens, there’s a stain on your fine trousers, my dear. Why don’t you take those off?_ She removes her sweater, depositing it along with the heels and purse on a sideboard under a very brown portrait of some ancestor attempting a Byronesque pose: wavy hair, open-necked white shirt, suggestive whorls of chest hair. Probably back in the day it caused a lot of soiled and/or twisted knickers. At this point, damn lucky enough not to have gotten caught running around naked with her wrists tied, the minimal embarrassment of having the former one-night-stand of one’s current one-night-stand act as a handmaid seems inconsequential.

Eleanor hands her the espresso. “I hope you don’t mind—your strap is twisted—” A cool finger glides between the bra strap and Caroline’s twitching skin, smoothing it down.

Caroline's lips touch the rim of the cup in a tentative embrace. The espresso is indeed excellent, thick and bracingly bittersweet. The zipper courses slowly up her back. Once again she is armored and intact.

“Thank you,” she says.

“You’re _quite_ welcome.”

“It’s—” At a loss, she can only repeat herself. “—the house is really something. Can’t wait to see how your renovations go.”

“You must follow us now,” Eleanor murmurs ominously.

The fine fair hairs on the back of Caroline’s neck tingle and rise. She hums nervously. “I’m—I’m sorry? What?”

“The house.” Lightly Eleanor’s hands brush across Caroline’s shoulders, as if bestowing wings upon her, a benediction. “The house is on Instagram now.”


	8. the private life of the contemporary courtier

**_dogwood_ **

Before her eyes open, Gillian responds to the siren call of trees in the garden—the dense blackthorn, the tall poplar, the sprawling, silver-leafed dogwood—to the swirl of their dervish wind. Memory gorges on these distended, fragmented sensations and she pictures the lonely oak tree of the farmhouse long gone, the oaks and alders along pathways of the Dales that she knew so well when younger. She turns over, finds herself alone and squinting at a vast landscape of linen sheets resembling a parched and chalky scorched earth; then, with the pleasing, revelatory slowness of a long, deep kiss, it occurs that last night’s surly submissive has somehow slipped the bonds of her bra.

She laughs and in wonderment drags a hand over her face, peeks through shuttered fingers at the treetops; the sexual synesthesia of fragmented green and gold light tastes like a woman—no, wait, it tastes like _her._

She cannot stop laughing for several minutes and later, when she finally gets up, goes to the loo, and finds crumpled stockings in the bin, starts cackling anew. But now, riding the coattails of merry satiation is one thought alone: _hell of a woman._

**_demitasse_ **

Under a late summer sky, Gillian slouches in a wicker chair in front of a breakfast feast laid out on charmingly artisanal wooden table that cost nearly a thousand quid. She knows how much it was because she was present when it was delivered to the house; while Eleanor and James argued furiously over the expense, she had quietly sneered at it, thinking that she could probably make something just as good herself.

That’s the only thing she misses about the past, about the life she led before this one—working with her hands. Today’s most labor-intensive activity will be the delicate tapping of a soft-boiled egg with a tiny spoon.

Across the table, Eleanor furiously stirs yogurt while complaining about James, who had made a brief appearance at breakfast, sucked down the contents of a coffee cup, picked at some granola, bitched at Eleanor for arguing with the art teacher last night, and then disappeared back to his study on the pretext of “work.” Gillian knows there’s no work to be done because she’s already taken care of it—revising and editing a presentation he is giving at a conference next month. Which means he’s probably been on the mobile with Graham all morning.

“He’s obsessed with Graham now,” Eleanor laments.

Gillian’s first impulse is to admit that Graham is pretty fit and she fully understands James’s obsession, but that is not what the situation calls for. Fortunately over the years that mad, self-defeating tendency has surrendered to rigorous training in the art of tact, the skill of withholding. When it comes to sex, however, she has always known how to withhold to a mutually satisfying advantage. Head tilted skyward, she watches the trees writhe in the wind. Caroline moved like that underneath her; with rooted, powerful grace, the sound of _please_ rustling as leaves in the wind.

Smiling, Gillian assures with confidence: “It’ll pass.”

“And what about you?” Eleanor asks.

From the majestic heights of detailed sensual recall, Gillian comes down to earth. Despite the generous, always-open weekend invitation— _bring along someone if you like_ —she had fully anticipated jealousy on Eleanor’s part when she finally did so. No matter that it all went down like a pickup in a club rather than a romantic weekend jaunt involving brunch and antiquing. Does Caroline indulge in shit like that? _No matter._ James is too absorbed in his new fling. The thing they all had together was never meant to last and the only reason she is invited to the house on a regular basis now is that she remains useful in some capacity, if no longer a sexual one. She is a buffer, an adviser, a confidante. And last weekend she fixed a clog in a bathroom sink while both James and Eleanor watched with the awestruck fascination of cats that observe humans taking showers. Despite Caroline’s sardonic description of her place here, she rather likes the thought of being a courtier. As long as she maintains this flexible position, she can enjoy breakfasts in a beguiling garden, espresso in a gold-rimmed demitasse, a _baldacchino_ of trees over her head.

But now Gillian pretends to sip espresso out of an empty cup. “What about me?”

Eleanor licks the yogurt spoon and smirks shrewdly. “Will it pass for you too?”

**_doppio_ **

“Do you think,” Kate says slowly, “we could try? Give it a go?”

The large picture window of the cafe frames Harrogate in a screen of steely, steady rain. Occasional traffic lights blink and flash, break the monotony and serve as grim indicators, like hospital monitors and revealing that the city is doing rather poorly and it might be time to take the old girl off life support. In other words, it’s a typical English day.

Gillian feels her mouth twitch violently. When she first started at university, she took elocution lessons aimed at the dual destruction of a thick-as-mud northern accent and an equally annoying stammer. While the former proved somewhat intractable—like a ghosted railway, a crooked rusty trace of Yorkshire will always run faint but indelible in her voice—the latter is now easily controlled.

Her instructor, who looked like an extra out of _The Hobbit_ but spoke in the immaculately rich, posh tones of Jeremy Irons, gave her the best weapon possible toward that goal. _You have what gamblers call a tell,_ he had said: a physical tic, gesture, or change in demeanor that can predict a player’s intent or hand in a game. The mouth twitch was the tell, he said, a dead giveaway that she was on the verge of undamming a stream of disjointed sentences and thoughts on a flotilla of frustrated consonants.

 _When you feel that twitch,_ he advised, _stop. Take a breath. Compose your thoughts. Make them wait. You see—_ here he stopped and took a long draught of tea— _it gives you the power._

Sitting across from Kate McKenzie, she feels not only the mouth twitch, but also an eye spasm—which was really not good and fuck all, he never said what to do if an eye twitch was involved—and wonders what the hell she’s going to say here aside from, _are you out of your fucking mind?_

“I know it all sounds mad,” Kate says quickly. “But hear me out.”

A reprieve. Gillian exhales a breath and inhales the better part of the doppio macchiato she’s ordered.

“We’re both grown-ups, used to being independent and being on our own, so I think something long-distance could truly work out and benefit both of us. There’d be no drama. I’d give you plenty of space. And it’s not too long distance. Only an hour away, and I certainly wouldn’t make you come up to Durham all the time.” Kate taps a nervous finger against a teacup. “I’m not going to be there forever. That’s not part of the plan. It’s a steppingstone. A couple years there will look good on my CV.”

Still, Gillian is uncertain at how they have arrived at talk of a serious relationship from the bare bones of a drunken shag and a surprise hookup. After Kate left for Durham, she thought it was all and done; she would occasionally run into Kate professionally and they would be friendly and nothing more. Additionally, it seemed highly likely that she would once again leap onto the churning wheel of serial monogamy. In fact, Gillian had been surprised that the relationship with her swaggering police sergeant had already run out of steam. Perhaps after Caroline she had a limited tolerance for dysfunction.

Wait till you get a fucking load of me, Gillian wants to say.

A scant month after the first time, Kate was back in town to close out sale of her flat and, with an unexpected phone call, deterred Gillian’s raucous Saturday night plan of watching _The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence_ with her father. She could hardly turn down the prospect of a shag at a snazzy boutique hotel. The drinks were expensive, the sex decent, and Gillian had hoped to get a decent kip for a few hours before slinking out at five in the morning—if there was one habit of farm life still in her blood, it was the call of the early morning wakeup—but Kate was clearly one of those types who loved to chat afterward, and her favorite topic of conversation was one Caroline Dawson.

Caroline was “amazing, really—smart, charming, funny, beautiful, almost perfect, save for one thing.”

“And what’s that?” Gillian, head pillowed on her forearms, had mumbled sleepily.

“She’s a complete fucking bitch. Or a low-level sociopath. Can’t decide which, really.”

Gillian couldn’t figure out what Caroline Dawson was either. One woman’s fascination was apparently another’s psychotic bitch ex.

She sees now that Kate is awaiting some kind of response. Carefully, she rests her hands on the table. “This is unexpected.”

Obviously Kate has anticipated this reaction, and smiles ruefully. “Yeah. I know it’s a lot to take in. We’ve been rather, er, casual so far. And you’re, ah, perhaps not ready for something more—shall we say, structured?” Intent, she leans forward. “But then—perhaps you are?”

Puzzling through it all, she silently admits that Kate might be onto something. Maybe it was obvious: She’s spent so many years scrambling and working nonstop to get ahead that the prospect of settling in at Sulgrave, of putting her professional life on cruise control for a while, holds enormous appeal, as does a concordant path for her personal life. Relationships always required an amount of energy and time she could never muster, leaving sex as primarily a sport and a pastime; but now every other random shag of a parent or a teacher or a bloke in a pub or a woman in a club somehow seems a lesser triumph. Not to mention the rumors. James had recently cautioned her: _Now that you’re head, you might want to be a little more discerning, a little more discreet—_ this coming from a married man who recently gave a blowjob to his boyfriend in the public restroom of a Costa. Kate, however, has always maintained such a clear-eyed balance of intellect and instinct so well that it wouldn’t surprise Gillian if this woman intuits her needs better than she does herself.

What Kate does not know is that in the scant minutes Gillian spent waiting for her arrival at the café, Gillian had stared dumbly at her mobile, more specifically, at Caroline’s number in her contacts list.

Caroline is the bit of the puzzle that does not quite fit straightaway; the weird random piece that one suspects is either from another puzzle altogether or the key that will make everything around it interlock so quickly that you race to a spectacular finish. These are but two of myriad interpretations. She cannot shake it, the feeling that Caroline sees right through her—everything that Gillian worked for, everything she had achieved, all of it dismissed with ruthless inscrutability. Caroline was not buying the image, and yet did not seem displeased at what she suspected was underneath it—even, in fact, appearing to offer tacit acceptance in every glance and gesture: It felt like recognition.

Either all that, or Gillian is simply mad about the bitch because she’s a terrific shag.

So she smiles and, in recompense for Kate’s sensible and quite generous proposition, offers the most honest reason for its refusal: “I’m not the person you think I am.”


	9. the good, the bad, and the Friuli

On a rainy, late autumn day Caroline—hair a damp curly mess closely resembling Glenn Close’s abysmal _Fatal Attraction_ perm thanks to getting caught in a sudden downpour outside and wearing a new trench coat that, while stylish as hell, apparently affords little protection against the elements—finally comes to the decision that Wetherspoons truly is the seventh circle of hell. At the behest of her mother she is at the Wetherspoons pub in Halifax known as The Mossy Lane that, much to Kate’s delight, she always called the Mossy Minge, causing the former to titter in that delicious, quasi-scandalized _you’re so naughty_ fashion that Caroline loathed in teenage girls but somehow found adorable in a fortyish adult woman.

She is here to meet Celia’s elderly gentleman suitor, whom apparently has known Celia since she was 16 or 17 or 18 or something and they were terribly in love or whatever—even though this significant relationship, _he’s the love of my life_ her mother had declared melodramatically _,_ has never, ever been previously mentioned to Caroline—then things mysteriously went tits up between them but thanks to the glory of the internet, they have rediscovered one another and so Celia wants her daughter to meet this wonderful, perfect, tweed-clad man who just happens to be accompanied by his grown daughter, who just happens to be Gillian Greenwood, whom Caroline has not seen since the night she was fucked six ways to Sunday in five different positions, with four orgasms, three leg cramps, two near-suffocations, tied up with one bra, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Christmas will be _really_ fucking awkward this year, Caroline thinks.

Unsurprisingly she enters a mild fugue state and attempts to ignore the inscrutable woman who hovers behind her father and Caroline’s mother in the noisy background of the pub, but whose elegant fingers are pronged tense against a tabletop as she supports herself in the genteel, agonized manner of a slumming countess who has discovered the teashop is out of Darjeeling.

Burbling happily, Celia introduces Alan Buttershaw and his tweed jacket.

Mossy Minge, Mossy Minge, Mossy Minge. This perverted lullaby rocks the cradle of her addled brain until—

“ _Caroline,_ ” Celia prompts irritably.

“Oh. Yes. I’m so sorry. It’s been a long day. Alan, it’s really wonderful to meet you.”

She offers a hand. Despite her drenched rat appearance, though, Alan is a hugger; when she loudly protests, he scoffs playfully and pulls her into a quick, gentle embrace. In the background she hears Celia drawl in theatrical surprise, “You must be Gillian!” and Gillian chuckling nervously and replying, “Yes, that’d be me.”

Alan has kind eyes, like bright blue buttons. He takes the sodden trench coat, offers Caroline a pristine folded handkerchief to wipe her rain-slashed face, and asks what she’d like to drink.

“Everything,” she croaks.

He laughs. “Your mum says you are rather fond of good, full-bodied reds. How does that sound?”

“Perfect. Thank you.”

Alan pats her arm and goes off to the bar, leaving the women stupidly standing and staring at one another as if they are reenacting the climactic standoff from _The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly_ and Caroline has no idea who is who except that she is fairly certain she’s the one who will get killed.

Gillian, who is good and bad but definitely not ugly, is dressed casual-professional today: faded jeans and a slubby, slouchy black blazer over a gray t-shirt, on which Caroline can make out a stack of collegiate letters: EEDS WOM UG. Her brain plays _Wheel of Fortune_ and quickly fills in the blanks and Christ all mighty, did this bitch really play rugby for Leeds?

Finally, Celia thinks to make an introduction. “Gillian. This is my daughter, Caroline.”

“Yes. Caroline,” Gillian says flatly, politely, and the note of familiarity brings social nicety to its knees.

“Wait.” Like a spectator at a tennis match that that’s finally gotten interesting—and if that were the case and Caroline had a racket in her hand, she would be going full McEnroe right about now, _Jesus fucking Christ, you’re not being fair, none of you_ —Celia’s gaze bounces back between her daughter and Gillian. “You two know each other?”

“We’ve met,” Gillian says dryly.

Her mother eyeballs Caroline suspiciously and, fortunately for all involved, before Caroline can say the first thing that comes to mind— _she ties really great knots!_ —Gillian makes a rumbly noise in her throat and finds her tongue again, the same clever wonderful tongue that made quite the circuit around and in between her thighs that night.

“Lawrence is a new student at my school, Sulgrave Heath,” she says.

This new bit of information prompts renewed scrutiny of Gillian’s slender frame and casual couture. “ _You’re_ the head of Sulgrave Heath?” Celia screeches, perhaps expecting a bosomy Victorian spinster in a high-necked blouse. No matter, Caroline knows that the sweetly tweed Alan is in for it. Indeed, when he returns five minutes later with a glass of red for Caroline and white for his paramour, Celia wastes no time in flinging accusation: “Alan! You didn’t tell me Gillian is the head teacher of _Sulgrave Heath._ That’s where Lawrence goes. That’s where William went!”

“Oh. I—forgot.”

The women stare at him.

Sheepishly he winces and directs the first apology at Gillian. “I’m so sorry, love. You were at Thornhill for so long, I keep forgetting—”

The mere thought of Gillian at Thornhill, an all-girls school, makes Caroline bite back a guffaw. Wolf in the henhouse. But a forced, long-suffering smile throws a brief shadow across Gillian’s face and Caroline takes note of its similarity to the fleeting, self-deprecating awareness she had inadvertently revealed the first time they met. It is the look of a woman who all her life has worked twice as hard as anyone but reaps only half the recognition and reward, even from her own father.

Then Alan stumbles through an apology to Celia and presses a wineglass into Caroline’s hand. “Frankie says it’s from, ah, Friuli? I hope that means it’s good!”

Thus armed with beverages and recrimination, they all settle in at the table. Together, Celia and Alan are like a reunited Vaudeville act; they fall easily into the rhythms of a shared past, an imagined life together. Alan is a natural raconteur and his daughter laughs indulgently at stories she’s no doubt heard a hundred times before. Only at a dismissive mention of Gillian’s mother’s name—“Oh, that was the year Eileen went back to work”—does a cloud of some unspecified emotion, possibly in the taxonomy of regret, cross her face. An hour passes by easily, at which point a break in the action is more pleasure than strict necessity. With a loud and dramatic _ahem_ , Celia excuses herself for the bathroom—clearly she wants Caroline to come along so they can discuss Alan but despite some curiosity regarding the state of her hair, Caroline demurs. As Celia toddles off to the WC, Alan spots a mate up front at the bar and excuses himself to say hello.

Now that they are finally alone, and even though she’s had nearly an hour to sort-of mull it over, Caroline has no idea what to say to this woman.

Hunched over a pint, Gillian’s fingers furiously can-can along the side of the glass. She sighs.

“I d-didn’t—” Gillian begins—and stops. She stiffens, nostrils flare, and her mouth twists with such contempt and self-loathing that it’s painfully obvious the stammer is a hateful reanimation, a muscle memory from a past long buried.

She takes a steadying breath and tries it again, slower: “I didn’t know. That Celia was your mum. I mean—I didn’t even know she _existed_ until two days ago. He kept that bit of the past well under his sleeve, the old man did. And today, driving over here, he told she had a grown daughter about my age, and he mentioned your name, and—it all fell into place. Nearly drove the BMW off the road.”

“Same here,” Caroline replies. “Complete fucking surprise.” She sips at the wine, which is surprisingly good. “My parents didn’t have the greatest marriage, it’s true, but I’d never heard Mum speak of this tremendous, long-lost love.” She snorts derisively and then realizes that Gillian might interpret that as slagging off on her father when in fact she was merely shitting all over the concept of romantic love. Nowadays the mere thought of love clenches her like a fist. But there is still beauty to be had in the world. 

She glances at Gillian, who says nothing and fills the awkward silence with more pint glass drumming. 

In lieu of either telling her to knock that the fuck off or offering up a shag in that BMW of hers, Caroline attempts actual conversation. She nods at the visible stack of letters on Gillian’s t-shirt. “Did you really play rugby at Leeds?”

Gillian chortles. “Yeah. My pathetic attempt at fitting in. Amazed I lasted as long as I did. Thought I was in decent shape then, having farmed for so many years. But those girls—Christ. They worked out all the time, not to mention everyone was taller and bigger than me. And meaner.” She shakes her head. “Bloody bitches. They loved to knock the shit out of me, just because they could. But I adjusted. Like I always do. Every time I got the ball, I would just run like hell. I would run and run and run, didn’t stop for nothing, and then when I got close enough to the goal, I would just punt her into the wild blue. And score.” A small, triumphant smile graces her features; it’s beautiful.

“Running and running and running.” Caroline realizes she’s said it aloud. She hesitates, and then: “How do you know when to stop?”

“Well. That’s the trick, I suppose.” Gillian contemplates the empty pint glass limned with frothy cobwebs; its emptiness suggests she has nothing to lose and as such implores her to throw caution to the wind. She fixes a steady, arresting gaze on Caroline. “I want to see you again,” she says.

And I want to see who you really are, Caroline thinks. “Good.”

The queen is pleased. “Yeah?”

“One condition.”

And the wolf is curious. “What?”

Confident in the checkmate, Caroline leans back. “I get to tie you up this time.”


End file.
